--- title: "Who Actually Writes the Text for Your Website?" description: "Most people send far more copy than a website can hold. What only you can answer, what your provider cuts and shapes, and how to hand over your half in thirty minutes." date: 2026-08-17 lastUpdated: 2026-08-27 author: "David Wippel" tags: ["design"] locale: en translation: https://www.essentialweb.eu/de/blog/wer-schreibt-die-texte-fuer-deine-website/ url: https://www.essentialweb.eu/blog/who-writes-the-text-for-your-website/ --- # Who Actually Writes the Text for Your Website? > Most people send far more copy than a website can hold. What only you can answer, what your provider cuts and shapes, and how to hand over your half in thirty minutes. The design is signed off, the launch date is in the calendar, and then the email arrives: "Please send us the text for the five pages." What comes back is usually a long document. Everything the business does, described in full. Almost nobody sits there with an empty page. People are generous with what they know, and the work that follows is cutting and shaping. Website copy is made of two very different things, and a project almost never separates them: facts that only you hold, and writing work that your provider brings. As long as nobody draws that line, both arrive on your desk, and the shaping half is the one that eats your evenings. ## Who writes the text for a business website? Both sides do, at clearly separate points. You supply the facts: what you do, who for, what it costs, what proof exists. Your provider turns that into page copy and decides order, headlines, tone, and how much of it survives. A good provider asks you for the first half and delivers the second one themselves. ## What only you can answer These things live with you and nowhere else: in your head, in quotes you have sent, in emails where you explain the same thing for the twentieth time. That is the reason anyone is asking you in the first place. - **What you actually sell.** The job you most like taking, and the job you turn down. - **Who buys from you.** And what has just happened in those people's day when they reach for the phone. - **What it costs.** A price, a range, or a starting figure. A floor like € 1.500 gives a visitor something to work with. - **The real proof.** References, years in business, unit numbers, awards, a customer quote you are allowed to use. - **What the site is for, beyond looking good.** An enquiry, a booking, a sale, job applications. Almost nobody raises this unprompted, and it decides the shape of every single page. It is one of [the three questions nobody asks before ordering a website](/blog/three-questions-nobody-asks-before-ordering-a-website/). - **The question you answer every week.** It belongs on the page, usually near the top. A wine association wanted a page that sells tickets. That was their whole answer to "what is this site for", and everything else followed from it. One sentence does the job as long as it is true. Most of the raw material already exists somewhere too. In your quotes, in the price list, in old emails, in a presentation from two years ago. Someone who turns up with a logo, colours, and a prototype they clicked together themselves is handing over usable material, and it beats any first draft. ## What your provider handles The second half is craft, and it is what you are paying for: - The order on the page. What goes at the top, what disappears, what becomes a list. - Headlines a stranger understands in two seconds. - Cutting. Twelve sentences become four, and the four say more. - One consistent tone across every page, even when the material came from four sources. - The wording people actually search for. - Imprint, privacy policy, and the rest of the required pages in their correct form. In my experience a heavy cut goes down well, and the reason is trust. What a provider cannot do: set your prices, produce your references, or decide which jobs you want. Copy written entirely without you reads fine and contains claims you would never make on the phone. ## Who supplies what? | Part of the page | Comes from you | Comes from your provider | | ------------------- | ----------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------- | | The offer | Services, scope, limits | Wording that works outside your trade | | Audience | Who buys from you and why | How they are addressed, and in what tone | | Prices | Figures, models, what is included | Presentation and comparability | | Proof | References, numbers, quotes | Selection and placement | | Goal of the page | Enquiry, booking, sale, application | A structure that leads there | | Order and headlines | Sign-off | The draft | | Length and cutting | Sign-off | The draft | | Legal pages | Company details | Structure and correct wording | Order and cutting are the two rows where projects stall. Those are also the two most owners try to solve themselves, even though they sit in the right-hand column. ## How do you hand over what you already have? The material exists, and you never have to write the long document at all. Five steps, and the first one matters most because it skips the writing. 1. Record a voice memo. Answer the six questions below out loud, two minutes each. Talking you can do, you explain your business on the phone every day. 2. Send it raw, and do not tidy it up first. The recording or an automatic transcript, unedited. Half-sentences, repetitions and detours are all usable, and smoothing them out is work you would be paying to have done twice. 3. Add what already exists. Two quotes, the price list, three emails to prospects, the site of a company whose presence you like. Send more rather than less here, picking what survives is the next person's job. 4. Read the draft as a fact-check. It will be a lot shorter than what you sent. Three questions per page: is this true, is the price right, would you say this sentence to a customer. Leave the style alone, that is the part you are paying for. 5. One round of corrections, then publish. The copy carries on being edited after launch anyway. The six questions for the voice memo: 1. What do you do, in one sentence, the way you say it on the phone? 2. Who calls you, and what has just happened to that person? 3. What does it cost, or what figure does it start at? 4. Why you and not the business two streets over? 5. Which question do you get asked every week? 6. What should someone do once they are convinced? ## What about letting AI write the copy? You can, and the ranking question is smaller than the noise around it. Google's [published guidance on AI-generated content](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/02/google-search-and-ai-content) puts its focus on the quality of the content rather than on how the content was produced. It rules out one thing: using automation to generate content whose main purpose is to move a ranking. Writing your own five pages with help is not that. The full picture is in [what AI actually changes for your business website](/blog/what-ai-changes-for-your-business-website/). The practical problem is a different one. Most people cannot use AI well, and the copy it writes for them comes out generic and bland. That comes from what went into it. A model has no access to your prices, your references, or the goal you have for the site, so it fills the gap with something plausible. On a price, plausible and correct are two different things. Three inputs change the output, and most people supply none of them: - **Context.** The facts from your half of the job. What you sell, who buys it, what it costs, what the page is meant to do. - **A tone of voice guide.** How you talk. Two paragraphs will do it: what you call the people who buy from you, how formal you are, the words you never use. - **Examples.** Copy you would have been happy to write yourself, and a piece or two you would not. For clients who want one, I set up a copywriting agent with exactly that material loaded, and it produces usable first drafts. The bullet points you put in are worth more than what comes out. ## What happens when too much arrives? Nothing bad. A long document is a better starting position than a short one, and the work from there is selection, which is the half you are paying for. People do need time for this either way, and that is part of the job. What does happen: the launch slides, or the site goes live with placeholders that then sit there for a year. Both are avoidable by reversing the order. Structure and layout first, copy after that, page by page. One short true paragraph per page is enough to launch on, and the fuller version arrives while the site is running. The copy is never finished anyway. Every quarter I go through the sites I run and ask which parts of them have stopped being true. The full list of what comes up is in [what happens to your website after launch](/blog/what-happens-to-your-website-after-launch/). ## Your half, concretely Pick up your phone, answer the six questions out loud, and send the recording. That is your side of it, and it takes half an hour. How a project runs around it is in [getting a company website built in Austria](/blog/getting-a-business-website-built-in-austria/), and how many pages you have to write for at all is in [how many pages a business website needs](/blog/five-pages-every-business-website-needs/). With us the copy is part of the [subscription](/#plan) and it gets made in exactly this sequence.